As most parents know, children can have difficult periods growing up, when they just don’t seem to listen and seem keen on constant disruption.

These are often just phases, such as the “terrible twos”, but they can go on to more problematic issues, as this film tries to explore.

Moving into their new Canadian home are a Hungarian-born mum (Iringó Réti) and dad (Adám Tompa), and their four children. It’s the summer holiday period for the children, which puts pressure on their mum to find things to entertain them.

Their eldest child is teenager Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), who seems to be struggling the most with the move, and begins to display disruptive behaviour, that reveals itself in stealing and self harm.

The parents feel at the end of their tether and are desperately in need of some help, but is it too late?

This is the directorial debut from Sophy Romvari, which she also wrote and is said to be semi-autobiographical, although it is never credited as such.

It’s an attempt to examine fractured dynamics within a family, but the execution is sadly just as fractured. The problem at the centre of it all is Jeremy; he is deeply troubled, or so we are led to be believed, and that’s the real problem here. Beddoes’ has only a handful of lines throughout the entire film, so the behaviour shown is hardly overly concerning. Even the scene involving himself harming comes across as if he just nicked himself shaving.

We then learn that he is seeing a psychiatrist, but we are never privy to any of these sessions, so we only ever have his parents’ word to go on, which are all too flimsy.

Then a new character is introduced, who is from social services there to help, but she also appears to be making a documentary at the same time. It’s at this point that the film gets extremely flat, especially when she is sitting around a table with a group of believable professionals, but not so believable actors, that makes their input incredibly dry. As if Romvari couldn’t wring out all the emotion out of her film any more, she succeeds in doing just that.

To be fair, there is a curious twist at the end, but it’s not easy to be interested in it, after such a stilted and dull look at a family, who are shot through an emotion-vacuumed lens.

It’s difficult to care about its sensitive family issues, when you couldn’t care less about the family involved.

Perhaps the semi-autobiographical elements were just too difficult for Romvari to convey, but if that is indeed the case, she shouldn’t have tried to make a film about it. A rather dull, insipid one at that.